The time has finally come for us to start the actual writing process. We’re finding it slow going, even with all the preliminary work we did. The first three novels we wrote were a trilogy. By the time we got to the third one, we knew the characters better than we knew ourselves. It was dead easy to find their voices and dive in.

After the trilogy, though, we wrote a standalone novel, and had this same problem at the beginning. We just don’t know the characters well enough yet to feel totally at ease writing in their voices.

This is one place where writing with a partner can make things more difficult. If either of us were doing this solo, we could just wing it and see what happens. With two of us involved, and wanting everything to feel seamless, we both feel a little inhibited.

Because Jen is cruel, she makes Kent take on the first scene. It’s up to him to introduce the narrative voice, and the main character’s voice, too. Jen sits there and watches him type, because until she sees what he’s done she can’t write anything. The fear is that we will both write something great, but that the pieces won’t mesh. Instead of chocolate and peanut butter coming together to make a delicious peanut butter cup, we dread ending up with salmon bonbons. Either the fish or the ganache would be delectable on their own, but together they’re something the loser made on Iron Chef.

And so we tiptoe around each other, each of us hesitantly writing scenes and vignettes. When we share them, it is always with a healthy dose of Remember This Is A First Draft and I Don’t Know If This Works.

Fortunately, this weirdness is confined to the character voice. We know for sure that the actions and details contained in a scene will be right, and next week we’ll tell you how.